Hanoi

We arrived in Hanoi and got ready for a busy few days to maximize our time in the big city. We started with a trip to Ho Chi Min's Mausoleum and went through a crazy security process, a huge waiting line, and general chaos to follow thousands of Vietamese (and some Westerners) into the depths of the mausoleum to be entranced by Uncle Ho's embalmed self. It was quite the thing, mainly because he's so revered by the masses here. Along with his perfectly perserved body, we checked out his living quarters and a semi-entertaining museum.

Ho Chi Min waving a big hello to his followers

Enjoying a mighty fine ice cream after visiting Uncle Ho

We spent another day walking around the city, and seeing all the various shopping streets. Hanoi has streets lined with particular goods, so that you can wander through the shoe street, clothing street, tin street, herbal medicine street, painting goods street, and well...you get it. That night we checked out the Water Puppet Theatre, which was perhaps our highlight of Hanoi.

A rubbish picture but hopefully you can close your eyes and imagine the delight of having little wooden puppets creating a scene in a pool of water...was developed years ago by the workers in rice paddies

Another highlight of Hanoi was a cooking course we did. A highlight not because we learned amazing food to bring home to friends and family, but because it was fun and overall a good evening with a lovely English couple. Unfortunately of our 4 dishes, maybe 2 were ones we'd like to recreate...the seafood spring rolls were supposed to be "fusion" and had loads of mayo (ugh!), the caramelized pork was a little too runny and perhaps a bit on the dull side, but the banana leaf salad kicked butt (can we buy banana leaves in Canada?) and so did the sesame/peanut dessert.

There were so many beautiful cherry blossoms being bought by people still celebrating Tet...apparently this is a more Northern thing, explaining why we hadn't seen any yet.

We enjoyed the Fine Arts Museum immensely as well. It was full of all kinds of goodies like laquered Buddhas, Asian paintings, and beautiful wood sculptures. We saw lots of temples and pagodas, and spent some time at the Ethnology Museum learning about all the ethnic minorities.

We had some great food, met a couple of other cyclists from Seattle and had a meal with them, went for a great run in the city park and overall enjoyed the time in the city before hopping a train to Haiphong to being our Halong Bay adventure.